Parametric Research on Steel Cylinder Tower for Wind Power Generation

APDL parameterized command procedure is developed for geometry parameters of steel cylinder towers for wind power generation. Based on the linear elastic static calculation of 102 tower tube models by applying finite element code ANSYS, the influence law of mechanical performance of cylinder tower is obtained with the tower height H, the bottom diameter D, the top diameter U and the tower wall thickness T. With extracting the Y-coordinate of relevant nodes along the meridian, the windward displacement and the membrane stress, the relation curves between tower height and displacement and that between height and stress are drawn. The results indicate that the windward displacement increase significantly above the middle height. When it reaches the upper end of cylinder tower, the windward displacement gets maximum value. The stress of windward and leeward side decreases with the increase of height along the meridian of cylinder tower. In contrast, the stress of crosswind side has a slightly increasing trend with the escalating location along the meridian of cylinder tower. Stress mutations occur in the wall thickness change of cylinder tower.